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Talk:Philippe Pétain
Shall we make a Collaborators category? We could fill it in a heartbeat. Except that there'd be a gray area into which some characters would fall, a gray area that would probably depend on the personal preference of whomever was doing the editing. :I was thinking about that earlier. I'd be okay with it, although I might suggest we go with specific types of collaborators like "Axis Collaborators" which could separate out the black and white from the gray. TR 05:03, May 18, 2010 (UTC) ::Hmm--I'm afraid that would quickly prove self-defeating. Other than Axis Collaborators, I can't think of a single category that could meet our standards for category creation, or even any that are cut-and-dried. We could maybe lump Walter Ulbricht, Khorloogiin Choibalsan, and--and this is quite a stretch--Václav Havel into a Soviet Collaborators category. Or, we could swap Havel out for Konrad Adenauer and call it Allied Collaborators. Both categories have their three, and both surely have growth potential, but we're still forced to make judgment calls. If Ulbricht was a collaborator, was Adenauer? Or was Ulbricht a collaborator after all? The GFF would say yes to both. Someone in the vein of the Western Allies would answer no to the former and yes to the latter. A communist would reject the premise of the former (but would maintain that Adenauer was indeed a collaborator) and would probably say no to the latter, though someone who disputed Moscow's ideological purity might dissent. ::Are Robert Parsons, Lord Westmorland, and the rest collaborators in RB? To their minds the Tudors had gone extinct with the death of Mary, Elizabeth was a pretender, and Isabella's claim was valid. Are Mordechai Anielewicz and Tadeusz Bor-Komorowski Lizard collaborators, or were they independent actors who had decided that mutually beneficial cooperation with the Lizards was the best deal their parties could get with the hands they held? Even if they are collaborators, we need more than that to make a category, and the growth potential is gone now that there are no more Lizard books. So we'd end up putting them into the main Collaborators category anyway--No, wait, there's always Jacques Doriot, and if we feel inspired and energetic we could surely shake loose some minor characters. But that won't always be the case. ::Shall we make a Central Powers Collaborators in TL-191 Category? The only cut-and-dried one is Pascal Talon. Luther Bliss? Wright Patman? Michael Collins? The gray area hasn't gone anywhere. ::Even in the Axis we've got gray areas. Stipulate that Petain here, Puyi, Xuantong Emperor, Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, Konrad Henlein, Jozef Tiso, Emil Hácha, and Stanley Owana Laanui were all Quislings. (Speaking of which, I'm mildly surprised that we don't have an article on Quisling himself.) What about someone like Francisco Franco, Ion Antonescu, or in the end Benito Mussolini himself. All relied on Hitler's support to hold power, to some extent or other, but they'd climbed into his bed of their own free will. Of the three Antonescu's the only one who arguably didn't have a full range of options. They started out leading their countries into the Axis and gradually morphed into Hitler's toadies (though Franco in particular maintained an independent foreign policy after he no longer needed Hitler to help him beat the Republicans) and wound up holding down the fort for Hitler, but not to nearly the extent that Petain or the others did. ::I just don't think we'll be able to get out of having to make a judgment call as to whether someone was a collaborator. Your suggestion, I hate to say, really only provides the opportunity to lose sight of it for the moment in light of other, messier, less straightforward, and more superficial decisions that will also need to be made. Turtle Fan 05:47, May 18, 2010 (UTC) Also, how about a Puppet States category? There are plenty of those too. Turtle Fan 04:40, May 18, 2010 (UTC) :It seems like we debated this idea at one point and reached no resolution. Seems doable now. TR 05:03, May 18, 2010 (UTC) ::Vichy France, Manchukuo, Mengjiang, Mongolia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, West Algarve, East Algarve, Forthweg, Quebec, Mexico, Texas, Hawaii, Burma, and I haven't even broken a sweat yet. Yes, it has legs.